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Death of children sparks debate in China
Date
November 23, 2012
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Tom Phillips
Not everyone is lucky enough to be thriving in the country's economic boom, reports Tom Phillips from Shanghai.

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THE deaths of five children killed by carbon monoxide poisoning after lighting a fire in the rubbish bin they used as a shelter have provoked an outpouring of online grief and reinforced a national debate over China's growing wealth gap.

The five boys, cousins and brothers, aged between nine and 13, died on Thursday last week in Guizhou, China's poorest province, after they lit the charcoal fire to fend off the cold. Their bodies were found the next day.

Writing in the Global Times newspaper, commentator Lin Xi said the deaths had saddened the nation and underlined how China's poorest were increasingly marginalised. ''These kinds of grim accidents are only supposed to happen in fairytales,'' wrote the commentator who, like many, drew a parallel with Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Match Girl, in which ''a poor little girl, bareheaded and with naked feet'' freezes to death on New Year's Eve.

Chinese journalists descended on Bijie where the boys died, reports painting a shocking portrait of how neglect and poverty persist even after decades of economic boom.

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The boys were the sons of three brothers, two of them migrant workers who scraped a living by collecting rubbish in Guangdong province, the state news agency Xinhua reported. The Beijing News retraced the route between the dustbin where the boys were found dead and the impoverished village of Caqiangyan where they had been raised.

Only one, 12-year-old Tao Zhongjing, had been in school, the newspaper found.

Four education and civil affairs officials and two school principals in Bijie have been sacked over the incident, with two district officials suspended.

A week before their deaths, five dirty-looking boys had been seen wandering around the neighbourhood, locals said. After begging for money outside a school, they bought a large bowl of noodles and asked for five pairs of chopsticks.

Days earlier senior leaders in Beijing had trumpeted ''the Great Chinese renaissance'' at the Communist Party's 18th Congress.

Hu Jintao, the outgoing president, celebrated the country's transformation from a ''poor and backward'' place into ''an increasingly prosperous and powerful new China''.

But thousands of online commentators said the deaths were a reminder of how far there still was to go.

One micro-blogger invoked the words of the Tang Dynasty poet Du Fu: ''Behind red-painted gates the rich wine and dine, while the bones of those frozen to death by the roadside lie.'' TELEGRAPH

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